Myth of Arrival

"What comes forth from you as an artist cannot be controlled. But you have responsibilities as a global citizen. Your history dictates your duty. And by writing about black people, you are not limiting yourself. The experiences of African-Americans are as wide open as God's closet."

– August Wilson (1945-2005)

By way of respect for Mr. Wilson's passing, I will share my own reflections about being surrounded by titans and the vast distance between us.

One of the perks of living in Las Vegas (1999-2004) is that at some point everyone seems to pass through. Gerald Stern came in one day for a reading. For the record, I am terrible when it comes to networking, mixing and shaking and huckstering. I recognize the importance of self-promotion as a necessary evil, but wish I didn't have to. Even writing a biographic sketch at the back of a magazine publish my poems becomes problematic. As the poet Tim Yu put it, "[contributor's notes/ poet's bio] sound all sound the same. They're show-offy. They're like posting a resume at the end of an aria." The year before Stern arrived, Mark Doty came in for a reading and I couldn't get my nerve to show up to the Jewel Box Theater to attend. On the other hand, I would occasionally bump into UNLV's luminary, the Nigerian playwright, poet, novelist, critic and Nobel Prize winner,Wole Soyinka, and it was fascinating to listen to him in the elevator talk about African theater and drama.

Anyway Stern was wonderful. He gave a lecture and a reading and after the reading he wanted to go to a bar with all the students and celebrate. We ended up in some after-hours bar on the corner of Eastern and Tropicana. I have no idea what its name was, but I recall it was located right next to a Korean BBQ restaurant and featured a wooden water-wheel as decor. However, they wouldn't serve us. Gerald Stern had brought his family along, which included his adult children and (I think) a new-born grandchild. It was the baby the bar-keep objected to, some strange Nevada law prohibited him from serving us while infants were around. So he kicked us out and we ended up some ghastly Good Ol' Boy Americana burger joint that featured crass images of Marilyn, Jimmy D. and Elvis and the air-conditioner was turned up to "deep freeze."

However, what made this memory pointed to me with the passing of Mr. Wilson was a sickening in-sight I had at the after-poetry-reading mixer, the "milling about while the organizers of the reading find enough cars to car pool to the bar." I was talking with Dr. John M. Bowers, who had been one of my few supporter in the English Department, a department full of academics who were at the time attempting to commit acts of mayhem to my graduate student career by making my life at UNLV as miserable as possible¹ when Willis Barnstone and Gerald Stern wandered up. The three men talked for a few minutes and I stood by watching. What struck me then, as it does now, was that each man possessed exhaustive talents which I desperately needed to learn and that I would never learn from these men or any other. Call it a matter of persistence — I was looking (though I didn't even know it) for a Guru² I believe that shook me; the sudden sadness that this hunger would never be appeased. I will not find a maestro, liege, abecedarian in this lifetime. Perhaps this is where I should begin my villanelle:

turning away from my maestro's shadow
her furious psalm and my queer canto

Mr. Wilson writes: "Your history dictates your duty." Your history dictates your duty, indeed. I found a fascinating conversation on poetry, the politics of poetry and the duty of the poet to his or her craft back in January 2005 on Alberto Romero Bermo's Sea-Camel blog. In "Fear among the peerless" he writes:

"Each generation must weave and punch depending on the circumstances. They also must go back, reassess, and continue in different lines — not necessarily forward moving. There is no one poetic group superior to the other, lest we make a competition out of the whole thing. Such only occurs in the here and now where politics proliferate over poetry. Politics, however, soon die. Unfortunately — though that may not be the right word — some poets are born at the wrong time, so to speak. They don’t fit in with the reigning group (and I always turn to Wordsworth as an example). However, few succeed in their life times to come up with the necessary juice to make a splash. Obviously that means nothing in terms of “poetic time” and eternal literary survival."

"And now … politics proliferate over poetry." This is not in a contradiction of August Wilson writing: "All art is political in the sense that it serves someone’s politics." It is just that our dominate literary culture has the freedom, leisure, satisfaction to ignore all that (cue: Marxist literary theory).³ But back to Mr. Romero Bermo's point, for art and artists, is our it obligation as the live wires of poetry to help our fellow poets, anyone who asks? Not every poet is a blogger, or has as Jane Hirshfield put it: "time, and silence,/ enough paper to make mistakes and go on." I do not know what you will say, however I feel it is my duty to help any poet who approaches, regardless of the world they come from, in whatever form that might take.

Turning away from my maestro's shadow;
a prayer, a touch, her disturbing cries,
her furious psalm and my queer canto

that now shall never be. Shall I forgo
my clan, kith and kin, and all it implies?
Turning away from my maestro's shadow

to the south shall I find in the meadow
lark better favors? If the west denies
her furious psalm and my queer canto,

your maniac chorus, what modern sorrow
will bear fruit? what eve shall descend? arise?
Turning away from my maestro's shadow

to the north, shall I find her in the snow
fields? our wastelands? Will the east despise
her furious psalm and my queer canto,

this maniac chorus? I have no maestro,
no prayer, no touch. You turn away, likewise
I turn away from my maestro's shadow;
her furious psalm and my queer canto.

1. … and a BIG shout of thanks and love to Dr. Aliki Barnstone and Dr. Evelyn J. Gajowski who both stood by my side through much thick and thin [back]
2. "Rabbi" would be a better word, I think though, at least in the function of what I wanted. I cannot but recall all the early 1990s claptrap concerning Robert Bly's "driving the feminine out of the temple," and Iron John and the Men's Movement and all the misogyny it generated. I had teachers at university and was doing work the old-fashioned way but I think what I was looking for (and my disappointment as a result) was some elder who had gone through the ropes of academia and the world of poetry, someone willing to take my hand and pass on their knowledge and wisdom, in short, a Poetry Guru. [back]
3. Whole books have been devoted to arguing just the opposite, that high art does that have a sense of cultural identity attached to it. In a sense, the concept of negative ecstasy flies in the face of what Wilson is arguing as well. But I think that is missing the point of what he is trying to get at. Everything in America is political; our creative impulses are no exception. [back]

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 4th, 2005 at 2:18 pm and is filed under Scantily Clad Info Dump, Forms, Original Poetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.